Category: poems

(composing poetry in an office vacuum)
Imagine folding white paper rabbits.
Draw a black hole to crawl into.
Listen to radio static for “the pattern”.

Twist your fingers in your lap.
Gnaw the inside of your mouth.
Remember running alongside the bus.
March your feet under your desk in time to a song you have stuck in your head.

(telling not doing,
I am hollow, filled with straw)
Stand up to your superiors.
(still life in office chair)

Say ‘olive juice’ to yourself.
Mutter distractedly. (nobody is watching)
Chew the edges of your fingers threadbare, nibble at your quick.
(gateway activities to madness)

Demand impossibilities of invisible people.
Read your horoscope for the fifth time.
Give yourself a nosebleed and go home early,
or wait for an electric, metaphysic whistle.

Obsessively click the same part of the screen.
Punch the monitor with your palm.
Scribble a list of things you should be doing.
Cross out each one as if it were compete.

Look around for people watching you.
Pick up your telephone to check if it rang.
Wait till your screen saver kicks in and
move your mouse to turn it off.

(trying to capture a feeling)
Pretend this doesn’t make you nervous.
Laugh out loud at nothing.
Compose poetry in vacuum.

She’s poking her head
from underneath the soft shell.
She takes her time, of course–
and I’m a jackrabbit running
circles around her,
trying to get her to hurry up.

We have this push-pull relationship.
Opposites attract, and all that.
I feel like I’m constantly tugging on her sleeve,
and she’s constantly, patiently,
telling me to slow down, and
just wait for that
next
   big
      thing.

But have you ever seen turtles having sex?
I have this vivid image from the zoo,
male turtle grunting, neck stretched
farther out of his shell than I’d ever seen it,
barely moving at all–and his head, slowly,
so slowly, straining, struggling,
like he wanted desperately to
break free entirely.

And maybe there’s a little turtle in all of us.
But Ms Turtle, she’s bulking up,
(she gets red sometimes when I talk about her,)
and just maybe it’s time
for a little turtle soup.

Damn.

In my opinion.

Like, maybe,
that tired
“window to the soul”
chiche.
(If I believed in souls.)

But really,
damn.

This poem, (or poetic snippet) didn’t make the cut… I’m putting the book together right now, and I worked a bit on this piece, but ultimately decided I’m dissatisfied with it. So I thought I’d share:

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untitled — 6.2.2
“we’re bitches, we’re machines” -Pablo

we’re grass and stereo static
growing weeds of electric-lichen
clinging to westerly sides of telephone poles
and meter boxes and public switches
we’re electric light, we’re fallen streetlights
dying on the ground-wire
our fingers are sticky, our fingers, lightning

===

When I have time, I’ll probably post the whole book over with the oldpoems.

next door, long distance
summer kills in little deaths
heat is murder
ring tones like rhinestones

playing touch phone tag
long after bedtime
undercover siren singing
“Let it ring once,
I’ll call you right back.”

conversations like cyclones
weeks cradling handsets
pressing flesh to plastic
loving dial tones
playing a music of discovery

then,

waiting, like melting butter
“ok, I love you.”
a rain, see you next fall
sky like plaster and sandpaper
cigarette colored clouds
ash on the horizon

our tepid voices
halting and faltering
halt and fault
stammer our goodbyes
all is not resolved
I hear a pin drop,
raindrop, teardrop

it was the last call.

I saw this list of America’s Most Literate Cities last Friday. I have to read more about the study, but apparently I’m in the right place. I did finish the (short) novel I was reading this weekend. Echos of Chaos, by Robert E Vardeman. I’m still debating reading the two sequels. I did start the second one yesterday, but it’s pretty so-so. A bunch of us went swimming yesterday, and I was reading the last 10 pages in the back seat of a tiny sedan with 3 other people. Everyone made fun of me, but I had to finish it.

I’ve decided I want to publish a new book of poetry. I have most of the poems picked out, but I’m still debating the title. I came up with the title Poem Courier because I want to use Courier font to layout the thing, and I like the double meanings, but I’m not completely set on that title yet. I did, however, write a brief poem with the same title.

===

poem courier

text is not interactive
reading is linear
a word per thought
too fast for conscious-
ness to follow
a path through wordiness
not seeing the letters
for the words
not seeing meaning
for the letters

===

Other titles in consideration: Photocopies and Staples, Subliminal Beatbox, TextPanderer. Let me know what you think! I will probably do some more formal brainstorming in the near future.

I got carried away on the mindblurb front just now. In case you’re not familiar with the concept, I try to write these things regularly, (used to be once a day, but more often once a week). Usually I just squeeze off a line or phrase that comes immediately to mind. I try hard not to think about them. To empty myself completely and just write whatever words or images end up filling the void. And of course what comes out is definitely a reflection of how I feel or what I’ve been doing all day. But sometimes I surprise even myself!

The point is to increase my randomness factor. I think random links are crucial to good poetry. And by links I mean metaphor and simile to start out with, but also just bridging two or more ideas that wouldn’t have normally found themselves in the same poem (or line, or phrase). I mean, that’s what makes a good metaphor, is pulling in a concept that your audience wouldn’t have necessarily thought of, but somehow just “fits” the idea or concept or situation. And I’m a metaphor guy myself.

[I thought there was maybe a word that meant a poem where the entire thing is just one big metaphorical exploration, but I looked around on google, and I think it’s either just called an “Extended Metaphor Poem”, or there isn’t really a word/phrase for it at all.]

Anyway, after a bunch of random lines (see the “mindblurbs” link in my navigation) I started writing randomly in psudo-verse. Here’s what came out:

PS, lycanthrope is one of my favorite words, but for whatever reason, I seem to always forget what it means. Then I want to use it, so I look it up and remember that it’s a really cool word. This happened just now. Unfortunately, looking it up kind of ended the poetic moment…

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brain a slightly erect penile implant,
fingers stretched out into Ethernet,
gun-toting grey-matter-taxidermy
stuffing the proverbial handgun turkey

mouth hanker-yammering
sling-fisted flim-flamming
flaming,
on felt and fellatio patio furniture

sidewalk scope and rain-drip drope
grass is whiter on the other side of the slope
hill of baked farts
eyes going ever-so-slightly lycanthrope

ants in single file bending green blades
our bocce balls careening off of hills
sandy cities situated among dandelion landscapes
earthquake obliterated, front yard infested

our eyes are antennae, hands mandibles,
brains compound eyes — thinking five times
for every thought required

a big ball hits the fence, scares the squirrel
gutteral, he takes to tree

morning ripened like slightly smelly fruit
fuzzy on the underside and your fingers sink into it
but my fingers aren’t sinking into this morning

a dance song stuck in my head, with it
images of strobe lights and multicolored disco-ball trails
dancing girls and DJs with blurry fingers

===

I got into the EVE beta test. I’ve been playing it the last two nights… It seems to suffer from the same sort of hurry-up-and-wait mentality that all the other MMORPGs I’ve ever seen have suffered from. A lot of moving around doing nothing. I was talking about the whole mining setup (one of the basic tasks a newbie can perform) yesterday with a co-worker, and he compared it to starcraft… in starcraft, you perform essentially the same sort of mineral collection, but you do it by clicking on a peon, and right clicking on a place to mine… it takes about 2 seconds, and you keep getting minerals until your mine runs out. In EVE, you are the peon. And it takes ten to twenty minutes to go get a patch of minerals, which you then have to “refine” before you can sell. (actually, that’s not true, you can sell it before hand, but you make more $ if you refine it.)

I haven’t decided if doing the other more “mission type” objectives is any more exciting. Plus, last night before I logged off, one of my characters was basically just crashing the program every time I logged in with him. (The other one seemed to work fine.)

The song in my head/poem fragment is by the faint. Their new remix cd is awesome.

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spurge on words, winded like ginsburg
tongue a flabby malapropism flirtation
obfuscation by sesquipedalian obscurity

we are it. the end of it. a new form.
we also begin. our arrows point up. (noses too?)
let go. join us in space.

in the sand
a pebble bigger than an eye
that is a brain

in the brain
an eye bigger than a shut-tight eye
that is a word

in a word
an idea bigger than a word
that is an ostrich